How awesomely old school is this? An Amish gentleman using his team of horses to pull an 18 wheeler out of a ditch during snowy/icy weather. Good way to start a Sunday morning — rewarding random acts of kindness.

One of the upsides to having insomnia is you watch all sorts of things you wouldn’t ordinarily watch. Case in point, this humorous quote from an old James Cagney flick One Two Three filmed during the Cold War which couldn’t have sarcastically summed up the Achilles Heel of capitalism and forecasted the financial crisis any [...]

You would think snow in 49 of 50 states earlier in the year would be sufficient, but when Mother Nature begins dropping snow from Chicago to Mexico, I think it’s safe to say she’s a little cranky this winter. Source NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory Intense Blizzard Rolls Across the U.S.

I’ve got just one word for you… just one word… plastics nickels. Nickels are the next bubble: the metal content is now worth $0.07. If you melt it down, it’s worth 7 cents. One of the characters who made a fortune betting on the financial collapse of the system, is buying nickels. So he rings [...]

Always the wannabe astronaut, rarely do I pass up the chance to explain about how big the universe actually is. However, trying to explain the size and scope of the universe to someone who knows little about astronomy, isn’t aware that many of the “stars” in the night sky are actually galaxies containing billions of [...]

Finally… a weather event worthy of the phrase snowpocalypse! I wasn’t a big fan using the phrase snowpocalypse because I thought it was overused and had too much of a hype quality, but when rare events like 49 of 50 states have snow on the ground, an event such as this might actually be worthy [...]

Leave it to Fareed Zakaria to point out the irony of Republican tax policy that no one, but economic historians and datamongering financial bloggers (yours truly), have known all along but for whatever reason rarely gets mentioned mainstream news networks. Republicans are actually [just] as committed to Keynesian economics as the Democrats. Keynes simply said: [...]

Perhaps I’m having flashbacks to the Rupert Murdock & MySpace deal, but Google’s Six Billion Dollar bid for Groupon seems a little El Ridiculoso to me. As Jim Wang from Bargaineering.com cleverly put it: Google is basically buying an email list because Groupon is too new for brand loyalty. I’m all for entrepreneurship, and I [...]

Not to let my (biochemist) geek flag fly too much, here’s a look at your most probable adversary on Turkey Day. Tryptophan – 1 of 20 Amino Acids found in nearly all protein structures. While it’s true that the concentration of tryptophan in turkey (and chicken) is fairly high, the consumption of mass quantities of [...]

One of the more clever ideas from the movie Fight Club is the idea that terrorism could originate from nefarious actions involving economic warfare. This means actions that could affect the value of our currency, the value of our future investments, repayment of our debts, etc. Here’s a brief quote: [Narrator turns himself into the [...]

If comedians jokingly refer to Florida as “America’s penis“, then the above graphic illustrating the percentage of total homes that are in foreclosure would suggest that the U.S. real estate market, and Florida in particular, has a raging sexually transmitted disease. As Gonzalo Lira so cleverly put it: Mortgage Backed Securities are America’s Herpes—the gift [...]

The funny thing about hopium hope is that it’s a great way to sell an argument by appealing to our optimistic nature. Only problem is, using the “sell the hope” technique works only as long as a select few don’t get wise to the ploy or refuse to remain clueless. If they decide to jump [...]